Radial power saws are well known and are commonly used by craftsmen to perform a variety of tasks. In all cases where such saws are used it is necessary to support work pieces while at the same time feeding the work pieces to the saw. Most radial saws are provided with a short base or table that can be used to support work pieces. A fence is commonly provided for positioning work pieces. The most common practice is to push work pieces against the fence by hand while at the same time hand feeding the work pieces into the saw. At the end, a push rod is frequently used to complete the job and it is not uncommon for the work to fall on the floor after a cut is completed. Some people do not use a push rod, but rather go to the lead end of the work and pull the boards through the saw.
Present methods of supporting and feeding work pieces to a radial saw are not entirely satisfactory for several reasons. There is a constant risk that failure of a workman to promptly remove his hand from work pieces as he feeds work to a saw will result in injury. There have been occasions when a workman's hand or arm has been drawn into a saw, and on other occasions saws have kicked work pieces into a workman's stomach as he pulled the work pieces through the saw. It is very difficult to push a work piece against a fence and at the same time feed it into a saw. As a result cuts on radial saws tend to be very uneven, and close tolerance work is all but impossible. Also, improperly supported work pieces tend to feed unevenly into a saw, and as a cut nears its end a work piece may suddenly shift, bend, break, flip or fall, doing damage to the work piece or injury to the workman. A relatively common solution to these problems is to provide a saw table that is approximately twice the length of work pieces being fed into the saw, thereby providing support for work pieces at all times. Such tables take up a lot of room, are difficult to store or ship, and do not address the need for uniformly feeding work into a saw and the need to keep workmen's hands away from saw blades.
Saw tables of a variety of types are known in the prior art as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,151,642 issued on Oct. 6, 1964 to Eugene T. Olson which shows an angularly shiftable saw mount that is adapted to be readily mounted on most conventional power-driven hand saws and that is adapted for sawing panel boards such as ply wood. U.S. Pat. No. 4,007,657 issued on Feb. 15, 1977 to Andrew E. Burch shows a saw table having a pair of guides above a base for guiding a power saw as it cuts a fixed work piece. U.S. Pat. No. 4,068,551 issued on Jan. 17, 1978 to Lloyd D. Kreitz shows a folding extension table for accommodating comparatively long work pieces as they are fed into a radial arm saw. U.S. Pat. No. 4,327,619 issued on May 4, 1982 to John J. McNamee, Jr. shows a cutting table for cutting house siding in which a power saw is held on a guide rotated to make miter cuts in siding held on a table against a rail.